Kathleen Jamie: Essays and Poems on Her work

Rachel Falconer

Abstract

This volume constitutes the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to a sustained critical assessment of the writings of Kathleen Jamie, one of Scotland’s leading contemporary poets. Nationally and internationally acclaimed since her first major publications in the 1980s, Kathleen Jamie stands out from other contemporary poets in her exceptional musicality, her strikingly unusual perspectives, her wry humour, translucent imagery, and hard-edged economy of expression. In this collection of sixteen originally commissioned essays, the range of Jamie’s writing, from Black Spiders (1982) to F ... More

This volume constitutes the first collection of scholarly essays devoted to a sustained critical assessment of the writings of Kathleen Jamie, one of Scotland’s leading contemporary poets. Nationally and internationally acclaimed since her first major publications in the 1980s, Kathleen Jamie stands out from other contemporary poets in her exceptional musicality, her strikingly unusual perspectives, her wry humour, translucent imagery, and hard-edged economy of expression. In this collection of sixteen originally commissioned essays, the range of Jamie’s writing, from Black Spiders (1982) to Frissure (2013) is discussed, with attention both to her poetry, and new nature writing essays in prose. The collection adopts a range of critical approaches to Jamie’s work: ecocritical, formalist, philosophical, biographical, socio-political, gender-studies oriented, comparative, and more. There is a comprehensive Bibliography containing the only complete account to date, of Jamie’s works, including review, occasional poems, and radio interviews; as well as a survey of critical writing on Jamie and a list of awards for her work, up to 2015. The volume also breaks new ground formally by including original creative responses to Jamie’s work, with poems by leading contemporary poets including Michael Longley, Leontia Flynn and Fiona Sampson, among others. An original sound-recording archive of Jamie reading poems discussed at length in the volume, created in 2015, is also held at Edinburgh University Press, and is accessible only to readers of the volume.